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Oh, Katie. I love your zines so much and the latest issue of White Elephants possibly even the most of all, because it's your most personal. Like much personal writing, zines can be full of complaints, insecurity, and calling people out on their evil ways, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's rather nice to read a mostly happy zine. The framework of WE4 is Katie's descriptions of her yard sale & flea market shopping, but as she asks near the end "Is this zine even about yard sales anymore?" It once was, and probably will be again, but for issue 4, something happens that eclipses Katie's joy over finding weird textbooks to repurpose into stationery, knickknacks with the previous owners' history attached or imagined, and vintage clothing items whose worth or potential can be ferreted out only by artisan shoppers such as herself. What Katie finds in this zine is love, revealing a little bit more about it with each section.

recommendation:

I've read a fair amount of Cultural Revolution memoirs and novels. Like the others this story of Jiang's experiences in her early teens is pretty grisly: old folks humiliated and physically abused, children asked to turn against their parents, and a mob mentality ruling everything from the highest reaches of the government to the smallest minds of the neighborhood and school enforcers. The only different is that just a little bit I felt like Jiang doesn't truly get that her privilege (prior to the madness) was a bad thing. That she wasn't a star student because she was inherently good, and that the kids who ended up being red bullies hadn't previously been poor students because they were just stupid. She bemoans the negative effects of her family's wealth and history, but doesn't acknowledge that her family name and fortune had once been just as beneficial as they were now burdensome.

Extraordinary, Ordinary People is a great title, but inapt for this book. Toward the end Rice quotes the Greatest American Hero theme song "Believe or not, I'm walking on air." (YouTube link) I think a more accurate title in the same vein, would have been "Believe it or not, it's just me." Whether you love or hate her (and I'm in the latter camp, though I'd probably say "fear/revile," rather than "hate"), you have to acknowledge that Rice is in no way ordinary. Most people know she excelled in piano, but did you know she was also a competitive figure skater in her adolescence? Ignoring her political accomplishments (or crimes, if that's how you see them), she is a superstar solely as an academic, having achieved the rank of full professor and provost at Stanford University before she was 40. Also, although Rice clearly loves and appreciates her deceased parents and extended family, this is not a memoir of family; it's an autobiography from birth (preceded with a little family history) to the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in favor of W. To me it's also interesting as a memoir of the Birmingham Black middle class.

author gender:

I'm not sure whether to class this book as memoir or essays. It's a series of essays about the author's family and about herself. It's person-focused, rather than linear. Normally I'm wary of that sort of thing, but I didn't mind it here. Njeri is a journalist, so each piece could appear by itself in a magazine. With the context of all of the other pieces, though, you get a more complete picture of the author than you would otherwise. Her family is huge, and she has a lot of facets to her own personality to explore. Still, there are some commonalities. Njeri is full of heart, also moxie. She is not uncritical of her family and herself, but she also shows a lot of love and understanding, even for the broken parts of her family and herself.

author gender:

I loved this issue of QZAP:META from the old skool looking front cover photo of sailors making out to the anthemic back cover drawing of a large naked women by Mara Schnookums proclaiming "Any sex I have is queer sex any zine I make is a queer zine." Nerdslut Milo Miller's introduction lays out what it is to record one's life and struggles in zines and to preserve them in libraries and archives. Ze identifies the Queer Zine Archive Project, QZAP, as "part of a vast Yellow Submarine fleet of libraries, archives, and infoshops that all recognize the importance of saving and sharing populist and underground media." Ze makes me feel so proud to be part of that! The essays in the zine ride the activist/academic line in the most delicious way. Plus there's art. What's not to love?

This may shock some of y'all, but I don't always love zine books, that is zines issues collected or even somewhat repackaged. Exceptions include Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think by Pagan Kennedy and Pete Jordan's Dishwasher. Zines are meant to be read episodically; there needs to be some time between issues. I also don't think they all clean up well. They don't all belong in book form, all neatly bound and with consistent margins. I felt the same way about just about every show I worked on at the Public Theater that transferred to Broadway. The shows lost their intimacy in a large house with high ticket prices. Give me a $2 zine over a packaged anthology or a $10 black box play over a spectacular production with moving scenery every time!

I preface my review of Nicole Chaison's Passion to let you know where I'm coming from. I wanted to love it, but I didn't. I liked it, and I bet if I read the zine versions of her stories, I'd love them. One thing I really admire about the book, that I suspect isn't present in her zines is the illuminated manuscript approach, even though I found it confusing at first. Each page consists of minicomics illustrations on the side and text in the center. My problem was that I didn't know what to read first. I eventually found that it was better to read the text and then the art, but sometimes that meant the footnotes would be out of order. Yes, I said footnotes, an element that I found endearing.

The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson's grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C. Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes of Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have any money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums. p.112

Patti Smith's adventures with Robert Mapplethorpe and lots of the happening artists and musicians of the late 60s/early 70s--pretty neat to be inside her head like that.

No one who worked in "corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf. p.293

I'm a little afraid to proclaim how much I enjoyed this middle class white lady prison memoir for fear that my prison justice activist friends will tell me everything that's wrong with it. Regardless, Orange Is the New Black is a really good read. In Smith alumna Piper Kerman tells of her experiences doing time for a drug crime committed over ten years before her incarceration. It's not a woe is me (or woe is I) story. She fully cops to her crime and in fact prison does educate her on just how deleterious drug trafficking is when she understands her fellow inmates' addictions and plights. She isn't uncritical, though, of the "war on drugs."

Heart-and-lung transplantation was sometimes offered as life-sustaining therapy for those with end-stage pulmonary hypertension, but the selection of "appropriate" candidates for a limited number of organs could resemble the application process at elite colleges.

I secretly wish I was a doctor and not so secretly distrust and resent the medical profession, not to mention the health care industry. The House of Hope and Fear touches on the latter, more than the former. The author/doctor exhibits some annoyance with patients (and their families) that want to participate in developing their own treatment plans. The stories detail the cases of various emergency department patients, but the book is more about the Harborview hospital itself. Even so I didn't feel like I ever comprehended Harborview's unique funding model. It gets some public funds, but doesn't rely on them? But part of its mission is to serve the uninsured. The real problem with this book, which I neither loved nor hated, btw, is that it feels like it was written for someone's approval. Probably a few someones, since the book isn't as coherent as it could be.

Just when I'm getting jaded about zines, reading and cataloging 50 of them a week, it's nice to discover a new favorite zinester. I don't understand why Thara Harris isn't more of a zine superstar, not that "superstar" is really a concept that should be associated with zines. But you know what I mean, there are some zinesters that become widely known in our small community for producing well-made, thoughtful, creative, and visually appealing works. Ms. Harris, from West Virginia is one of those writer/artists. Or maybe she does have a rep, and I just didn't know about it for whatever reason? I can't really tell because she doesn't have that much of a web presence.